New Contender: Panasonic AG-HMC152EN

So there’s a new contender in point8cam. It’s the Panasonic AG-HMC152 (HMC150 for NTSC version). Pretty unattractive box is comes with, it’s as if I just bought Panny Microwave or something. Knowing that there’s a camera in a huge box like that, there’s no reason not to be excited.

With an upgrade of so many features and technology, few things I was psyched with was the viewfinder and the 3.5inch LCD screen. So much bigger than the Canon HV20. Other things would be built in XLR mics (phantom support), the iris/focus ring, gain control, auto/manual zoom, auto + limit over manual settings, 720p50 are the other little things out of a whole lot more.

Small tripod this is, but i didn’t have my Manfrotto 501HDV + 055XPROB then

Another bit of the party piece is the widest zoom of this camera. The HMC152 has a wider shot than the HV20+Raynox 0.66x Wide Angle Lens. Also it has a max aperture of F1.6 compared to the HV20’s F1.8. F1.8 side by side, the HMC150 makes a difference too.

The bittersweet experience with this camera is tapeless recording wrapped with the annoying AVCHD codec (Adobe After Effects CS4 has problems rendering this, even with the latest updates, so i have no choice but to convert the shot footage into a “friendlier” format since i rely heavily on AE). Let’s talk abit about the shooting modes of this camera. At the highest quality, there are a few recording modes:

HMC152 Shooting modes (at highest quality)
1. 1080i/50i
2. 1080p/25p
3. 720p/25p
4. 720p/50p

At a glance, usually we’d think no. 4 would have the biggest bitrate, followed by no.2 then either one of 1 and 3. Instead, because “they” claim AVCHD is smart in compression, they’re all almost the same in terms of the file size of the end output. Here comes the wonder: “Would no.4 and 2 have compression artifacts?”. Well I’m not too sure, but I notice artifacts in mode no.4, other HMC users please leave a comment if otherwise. Artifacts as in, 1 or 2 blocks of pixels look damaged, or rather, just a different colour then it should be. I’m not too sure if it’s the SDHC card consistency, but I only tested this mode on a Panasonic 4GB Class 4 card. I wonder if a faster card would actually fix this problem.

Anyhows, I ran a test of shooting in mode 2 and 3, to check out how well AVCHD compression is, and how well the different modes are handled when converted to another format. That will be shown in the next update, with screen captures, showing areas cropped at 100% before and after conversion. The point is to find how much loss of detail there is due to conversion of these different modes/compression ratios. These tests will include the following formats:

1080p test
1. Original AVCHD footage
2. MPEG-2 CBR 35mbps
3. MPEG-2 CBR 30mbps
4. MPEG-2 VBR 25-30-35mbps
5. Canopus

720p test
1. Original AVCHD footage
1. MPEG-2 CBR 30mbps

Also, the file size for each format will be illustrated accordingly. So camera operators/editors, stay tuned for the next update.
p/s: I have all the screen caps done